One of the major challenges within the online advertising market is the massive fragmentation of companies, services, and technology providers. A significant lack of standards among the mix of technologies and disparate user interfaces and backend systems makes integration between parties difficult, if not impossible.
More and more, the buying and selling of online or world wide web display advertising is moving from a “bulk impression” model to a “user specific” buying model where specific advertising is generated for a specific user or impression consumer. Agencies, networks, and publishers are getting smarter about which specific users are valuable for a given campaign; advertisers now require more and more flexible buying mechanisms to reach those specific users. Today's mechanisms require bulk purchasing based on some coarse targeting parameters. Current attempts at deeper integration between user data and the impression buyer generally involve some level of HTTP redirects which bounce a user back and forth between various serving systems. This makes the process very slow, adversely affects an impression consumer's experience of a website, and has a negative impact on the effectiveness of advertising included in a website.
Accordingly, there is a need for a modernized online advertising platform that incorporates managed sales and real-time auctions for advertising space inventory.